Wednesday, 22 March 2017

CfP: Mobilising Militant Pasts

The extent of retrospection in culture and politics is a topic
oft-commented upon and lamented. Public engagements with history and heritage
are frequently lumpenly categorised as ‘nostalgia’: sanitised, selective,
reassuring. Yet this obscures the sheer diversity of militant pasts in the present,
and of the contexts and processes that facilitate their re-manifestation. Che
Guevara’s face adorns posters and t-shirts worldwide, while Garibaldi gets
dunked in tea. Historic campaigns for racial and gender equality have been
regularly dramatized, including in the recent films Selma (2014) and Suffragette (2015). Internecine violence is
frequently documented, and its martyrs commemorated, in the fabric of the
physical environments where it occurred, as the murals of Belfast and Derry
testify. Such remembering and half-remembering of histories of divided societies,
of protest, unrest and insurrection, is far from inherently safe, nor easily
categorised.

This conference seeks to thrust treatments and legacies of the
militant past into the academic spotlight. We seek papers on retrospective
representations of themes including (but not limited to):

· Industrial
action

· Campaigns for
women’s rights

· Campaigns for
gay rights

· Campaigns for
religious tolerance and freedom

· Campaigns for
racial and ethnic equality

· Intercommunal
violence

· Protests, riots
and revolutions

There exists a vast array of models available for unpicking our
individual and social relationships with the past: Freud’s conception of
repeating, remembering and working through; Baudrillard’s of collecting and of
retro; de Certeau’s of memory and place; Hobsbawm’s of invented tradition;
Boym’s of restorative and reflective strains of nostalgia. Following on from
these examples, we seek papers that address the role of format-specific and
contextual dynamics and accompanying motivations in shaping the way militant
pasts are represented and used. When and where are different modes of
representation and appropriation – such as the reproduction of imagery and
motifs, re-narration, preservation of heritage, adaptation, re-enactment,
anniversaries, remembrance and commemoration – employed? How are these shaped
by the contexts in which they appear, whether in popular cultural forms, high
politics, heritage sectors, social movements, educational institutions,
biographies and autobiographies, or the internet? What purposes do they serve:
nostalgia; entertainment; commodification; education; calls to action; warning
or pacifying gestures? How have these narratives, images and artefacts diffuse
across time and space, and across formats and forums? How have their meanings
contested, and by whom?

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute presentations from all
disciplines and concerned with any time-period, including those with a
contemporary focus. Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, along
with a short CV, to conference organisers Ruth Adams, Dion Georgiou and
Andrew Smith at militantpasts@gmail.com
by 31 May 2017.